Welcome to the Becker's Health Care podcast, made for the people who power US health care. I'm Molly Gamble with Becker. Today, I'm sitting down with Reid Smith, Chief Consumer Officer with Ardent Health Services, to learn more about his role and his top priorities as of late. Reid, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being my guest. How are you today and where does the podcast find you?

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I am in Nashville, Tennessee today.

Perfect. Love Nashville. It's been a while since I've down there, but always such a great place to visit and such a healthcare hub, which I know the tourists don't always appreciate or seem to know. But great to catch up with you today, Reid. As I was preparing for this interview today, I was trying to think off the top of my head about how many other systems I've come across that have the chief consumer officer role. It's an atypical one for health systems. Before we dive into your work and a bit more about Ardent, can you help share some background on your position and its origin story with us?

Yeah, that's a great question. I've been doing this for a long time, 20 plus years or so, and come from the marketing world. For years and years, you had directors of marketing and VPs and even chief marketing officers, and still do around the country. I think the origin of this consumer-facing or consumer officer role is one that mirrors what we're doing as an organization and where our priorities are. It's not that we don't do marketing and communications and those types of things. We think about it maybe in a little bit of a different way. And so part of this is an opportunity to focus and orient ourselves around the consumer. And so consumer engagement, consumer experience, those types of things. And so that's just how we're looking at it. So instead of, again, a traditional marketing job description, so to speak, a lot of it is geared towards the idea of it being about the consumer. A title is just that. It's just a way that we can continue to remind how we're organizing ourselves and what the work looks like. But I've been in the job and we've had this role now for, I guess, going on a year or so.

Like you said, there's not a lot of them around the country. There's a few, but I think we'll start to see more of it.

Yeah, Reid, what I glean from your remarks there is that the role, whereas chief marketing officers might be traditionally a bit more reactive It sounds like this role, and I understand, you don't want to make too much of titles, but it sounds like what you described, this role is really coming from a place of being proactive and trying to meet the patient, the customer, further upstream so things are built with them more centered in mind than simply trying to react to them later on. Is that a fair summary?

Yeah, I think so. We're really trying to understand who is the consumer for us. It varies a little bit depending on what you're talking about and who you're talking about. But we have people that have been patients or have had received care at one of our locations in recent memory. Then we've got people that have done the same, but maybe it's been a little bit. Then there's folks that, quite honestly, we don't have any relationship with. I think historically, we focused an awful lot of time and energy as an industry on that last bucket, on the acquisition side of the equation. And that's where a lot of the advertising and marketing tactics have lent themselves. I think what we're trying to do is simply say, Okay, well, we know an awful lot about folks through the care that we've provided them. And so how do we position ourselves in a way to be a good partner to allow us to say, Well, here's the right next best step for you in your health care? To your point, it is very proactive in that way of how are we retaining and reactivating and reengaging folks that we already have a relationship with.

But that doesn't mean that we also are not also trying to go down the path of We still want to serve and find additional relationships in those communities. It's a balance, but yes, much more proactive, certainly.

Well, I skipped your role and your title immediately, but for listeners who could use a refresh on Ardent, can you share a few key facts about the system? Clearly, based in Nashville, like other systems, some key facts for us to keep in mind about Ardent.

Sure, yeah. So Ardent, like you said, based here in Nashville, Tennessee, we've got 30 hospitals and a couple of hundred sites of care across six states. So we provide everything you may think in a community, certainly a hospital. And a lot of people, I guess, view us and others based here in Nashville that way, but also in the ambulatory and even virtual care space. We've got physicians, we've got We've got urgent care. We have hospitals, all those types of things across eight markets in six states.

Then, Reid, how are you spending most of your time and your energy as of late? What's taking up most of your attention.

Yeah. Well, some of it is a little bit of what we've talked about, which is this orientation around the consumer and what does that mean and how does that change the work that we do on a daily basis. Some of the people in process side of the equipment situation. Then some of it, quite honestly, is the technology-driven side, too. How do we become better stewards of our dollars and our technologies that we have to build those experiences? Whether that's through our EHR or through other vendor partners and technologies that we have, how do we integrate all of those? How do we create an experience that the consumer expects? Most often from the rest of their life, but those influences. A lot of what we're looking at is, what do the people want from us and how do we provide that in a succinct and easy way? Some of that's technology-driven in more of a DIY fashion Some of that is more of a navigation type solution. Spending a lot of time there and then ultimately around innovation, around other parts of the business. If you think about our operations and how we play a role now through that lens, or maybe it's finance or technology, other things like that.

Again, part of it is just a reorientation, both internally and externally, about the consumer and what we're trying to accomplish. A lot of change management work, and then ultimately, how do we build experiences to power that.

We just appreciate the intersection you you sit in. I mean, health care for one, and then also this intersection of marketing and media and advertising and digital. I mean, there's just so much unfolding there, even between Google's algorithms of search. I mean, it's really a taxing and demanding intersection you're sitting in. You describe six states, eight markets, 30 hospitals, a number of outpatient settings, and then the tools you have to get the word out and build awareness around those services from Ardent are changing pretty regularly beneath you. Is that a fair read?

It is. I mean, it's a very simple, I guess, view or vantage point is everybody that we interact with, all these consumers in these markets, have a certain expectation based off of just their life and how they go about what they do. Health care, especially the provider side, has been somewhat of a lagger relative to that over the years. We've got to try to play some catch up and actually engage and create experiences that people want to engage in. That does. That changes every day. The ability to be nimble and entrepreneurial enough inside of an organization in an industry that is pretty big. I feel fortunate to be in an organization where we can do some of that, where we can try and test and try to figure out new and innovative ways to do things. But it is. It's a very uncertain and shifting landscape, certainly.

For colleagues who might be in a similar lane as you read in their health systems and hospitals, any closing thoughts or a message you'd like to leave listeners with?

The biggest thing I can say is be aware and go make friends. Understand other parts of the business, those other leaders, what they're in charge of, what their responsibilities are, how their worlds are changing. Then also just be aware and open to what the evolving landscape looks like. When I started doing this 20 years ago, the idea of experience and me, the marketing director, were two totally different things. They really didn't make any sense to live in the same bucket. Now it's really hard to tell where one starts and the other one stops. That's true broadly across the enterprise. Technology has done that. Again, you go probably from the vantage point of any of our senior leadership, say It's the same thing. My world is different than it was 20 years ago, and it's harder to understand exactly the swim lane and exactly where it starts and stops. Again, understanding, making friends, having conversations, and finding those allies that you can work alongside of is going to be really important because ultimately it is about the patients, about the consumer. We've got to figure out different ways to do that and keep that in mind as we're building these experiences.

We spent most of our conversation focused on more of the marketing aspect of the work. But when you hit on experience and marketing, we're previously two distinct and separate things. I remember 10 years ago, so much of the way experience was covered, at least in the media side of things about hospitals, was about the waiting rooms and furniture and design and those really physical elements of food. I think so much of it now, as our conversation has showed, about that digital experience, too.

It is. I think, again, the way we measure what we now call voice of the customer was through regulatory-based surveys. We still do that, and we'll continue to do that. But there's so many other ways that you can actually receive feedback from the consumer. You mentioned digital, but even in the physical space, how we're engaging those folks and allowing them to tell us how is it going. When you think about a consumer consumer journey, you're in the physical space, the digital space, you're back and forth. It's not super linear in most cases. It is. The idea of experience or the consumer journey or voice of the customer really, I guess, fuels the need for us to now be inside of clinical operating systems. How does the patient portal play a role in experience? How does the waiting room or kiosk or checking in or paper all dictate what the expectation is and how we engage folks. It is. It's a very different world, but it's exciting. It's a great opportunity to think about access and how we engage folks and how they come in and what are those steps and how can we play a role in orchestrating what that all looks like.

Well, Reid, I want to thank you for chatting with me today, for visiting, for sharing your thoughts with our listeners. This has been Reid Smith, Chief Consumer Officer with Ardent Health Services. A big role and a lot of work you and your team are up to, Reid. So thanks for getting us up to speed.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.